Leo remembers ‘courageous witness’ of Francis one year since his death

‘Still we hear his exhortations ring out, expressed with eloquent words to make the good news more understandable: mercy, peace, fraternity, the smell of the sheep, the field hospital.’

Pope Francis’s memory “is alive in the Church and in the world”, Pope Leo said on the first anniversary of his predecessor’s death.

In a message to Cardinal Giovanni Battista Re, dean of the College of Cardinals, that was read out at a Mass on Tuesday evening at Rome’s Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore, Leo said Francis offered “to all of us a courageous witness that represents a significant inheritance for the Church”.

“His teaching was lived as a disciple-missionary, as he loved to say. He remained a disciple of the Lord, faithful to his Baptism and to his consecration in episcopal ministry, until the end,” Leo said.

“He was also a missionary, proclaiming the Gospel of Mercy to ‘everybody, everybody, everybody’, as he said many times.  The blessings brought by his witness as a caring shepherd have touched the hearts of many people, to the end of the earth, thankful too for the apostolic pilgrimages and especially for the final ‘journey’ that was his illness and his death.”

Pope Francis died on 21 April 2025 in his rooms in the Vatican’s Casa Santa Marta, the day after giving the Urbi et Orbi blessing in St Peter’s Square on Easter Sunday. It was a month after he had been discharged from the Gemelli Hospital where he had spent five weeks. After his funeral on 26 April he was buried in the Basilica of Santa Maria Maggiore.

In his message for the anniversary Mass, Leo said Francis became pope “in a time that marked and is still marking a change of epoch”.

Following the legacy of the Second Vatican Council, he spurred the Church to be “open to mission, guardian of the world’s hope, impassioned for the proclamation of that Gospel that can give fullness and joy to every life”.

“Still we hear his exhortations ring out, expressed with eloquent words to make the good news more understandable: mercy, peace, fraternity, the smell of the sheep, the field hospital and many others,” Leo said.

“Every one of these expressions takes us back to the Gospel that he lived with a new language that proclaims the same Gospel of all time.”

Leo said death “is not a wall, but a door that opens wide to the mercy that Pope Francis tirelessly proclaimed”.

Speaking to reporters during his flight from Angola to Equatorial Guinea on Tuesday morning, the Pope reflected on his predecessor’s emphasis on God’s mercy, seen in the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy that he opened on 8 December 2015.  Days earlier, Francis opened a holy door in the cathedral in Bangui, capital of the Central African Republic.

Pope Leo said Francis “spoke from the heart of the mercy of God, how he spoke from the heart of this great love, of forgiveness, of this generous expression of the mercy of the Lord”, reflecting on the first messages of his pontificate in 2013.

“Let us pray that he, already, may be enjoying the Lord’s mercy, and we thank the Lord for the great gift of the life of Francis for the whole church and the whole world,” Leo said.

He marked the anniversary of Pope Francis’ death in his first formal address in Equatorial Guinea as he cited his condemnation of “an economy of exclusion and inequality” as an “economy [that] kills” in Evangelii Gaudium.

Leo said that “the proliferation of armed conflicts is often driven by the exploitation of oil and mineral deposits, occurring with no regard for international law or the self-determination of peoples”.

He warned that “the destiny of humanity risks being tragically compromised without a change of direction in the assumption of political responsibility and without respect for institutions and international agreements”.

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